


something missing

by roseisreturning



Category: Cheers (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 09:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17916194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseisreturning/pseuds/roseisreturning
Summary: "Well, Frasier, ever since I was a little girl, I've led a very disciplined, regimented life. But in the back of my mind, I always had this nagging feeling that something was missing. I tried to fill the void with achievements scientific awards, marriage to a prominent man. But deep down inside, I still felt empty." (Or, in which Lilith is a lesbian and not half as cold as everyone would like her to be.)





	something missing

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for (not particularly good, but consensual) sex, internalized homophobia, and me pretending like I have any kind of knowledge about psychology or psychoanalysis. If you need any more information about specific warnings before you read, please feel free to contact me @butchlilith on tumblr.

Lilith is a child when she first feels it: There is something inside of her, different from the others. The kindest will call this genius, and, when they do, Lilith chooses to believe them.

At this age, Lilith’s mother enrolls her in a dance course. The whole endeavor is frivolous at best, but Lilith never does quite unlearn the posture. At twenty-eight, she holds herself as rigidly as if the instructor is watching her still, drawing the other girls’ eyes to the line of her back. “You need to separate the body,” she would say, hand guiding arm and eyes watching legs. The habit is useful, so Lilith keeps it long after she persuades her mother to terminate her lessons. There is more to know, and Lilith cannot be kept from it.

(It will take eighteen years for Lilith’s mother to make another concession.)

Sixteen is the year that she learns to terrify, and the fear is just another award she collects. Twelve years later, it is no wonder that she is still being told to make herself easier to consume. The wonder is when she accepts.

The woman who offers, Diane, is soft in all but opinion, and her touch is no exception. Lilith has never loved a woman like this, but she has loved few women. She does not love Diane, of course, or feel any attraction to her at all, but she recognizes in her a potential Lilith has seldom seen.

(Dorothy tells her that she cut off her hair the moment her mother’s eyes left her neck, and Lilith should have known it then.)

Her hands are the critical detail—delicate, steady, precise. Lilith could use hands like these working alongside her. With the right training, these hands could do great things. Far more, at least, than tapping pigment on skin in imitation of a youth never possessed. When all is done, her fingers trace the edges of Lilith’s face, stopping just below the jaw, then tapping thrice on either side.

“Something’s missing,” she says, fingertips still light against Lilith’s neck. Lilith knows these words, has known them best in her more reckless days, but the touch is unfamiliar. A few more inches and she would reach the carotid, and Lilith knows that she will before they part; already, she can feel Diane’s perfume creeping serpentine in the air—not so oppressive as Sam’s cologne, but suffocating in that familiar, cloying way.

“My professional integrity, perhaps.”

Diane swats her arm, and even this is soft. “It is not!”

Foregoing the polite pause she would typically grant following such contact, Lilith distances herself. “Of course not,” she says. “I lost it the moment I accepted this absurd—“

Even her interruption is gentler than Lilith can bear. “Dr. Sternin,” she says, and there is a warmth even in this formality. “You remember that this is a rhetorical strategy. We’re not sacrificing an ounce of respectability with a little bit of lipstick.”

“It isn’t my usual tactic,” Lilith says, and Diane’s touch returns. Her hair, this time. Diane’s fingers have located one of the u-shaped pins securing her bun, and Lilith knows that they wait only for her permission. “But it would be foolish not to seize such a readily available advantage.”

Diane removes hair pin after hair pin, until Lilith’s hair is loose. “That’s right.” At last, she procures a bottle of perfume with a dull pink hue. “And, you know, a touch of mascara even offscreen could provide all kinds of advantages…”

Though not particularly grateful, Lilith thanks her. With this, Diane does what Lilith has known she would do all along, raising a freshly perfumed wrist to her neck. One moment, artery to artery, radial to carotid. The next, they are apart, and Lilith smells like her.

In this way, she prepares herself for the intimacies that will follow.

Lilith has spent eight years kissing men as nothing but the first in a string of pearls. Frasier is no different. He recites Eliot in the early days, another of his dead-end habits, and she wonders whether he knows that she counts the breaths in a minute, calculating how to proceed. There is a correct way of approaching such matters, and Lilith approaches all things correctly. The man in the poem is a coward, of course. It would take a fool to read these words in earnest, to find anything worthy of emulation, but Frasier remembers this only sometimes, and Lilith cares too little for Eliot to think it of any significance. She raps her index against his neck with each exhale and knows precisely how the evening (and all others) will proceed.

He will tell her later that this is the best sex of his life, and Lilith will act as if this comes as a surprise. As men do, he will compare her to the other women, and the list will be shorter than most, but Lilith’s name will be at the top.

For six years, this will be enough, and Lilith will embrace every moment he gives himself to her. In return, she will give someone to him.

She bests his most careful arguments in minutes, and with this Lilith knows: He craves nothing so much as a termagant. This is why he wants her. This is the only reason any man ever does. Few men do, of course, but this is of little significance; she wants fewer still.

The first time is in college, eight months after she meets Dorothy and later than the statistical average by several years. Positively correlated with achievement, negatively with marriage. Her mother grows impatient, her brother cruel. Being with him is the pragmatic choice, so it is the one Lilith makes. Four months into what must be a relationship, he interrupts her, smirking: “This is just what I like about you, Lil. You’re a challenge.”

Lilith supposes this means she is something to be overcome. With this, their romantic relationship ends. Each man who touches her later will construct a fantasy of turbulence as she plans her body’s every move.

It is like this that she finds herself married. It is like this that she finds herself a mother. None of this is so fast as it feels. Frasier performs that tired, requisite reluctance, first toward cohabitation, then marriage, then children, all so expected of his sex, and Lilith pushes him forward in the only manner she can, the manner he needs. She gives him ultimatums, tells him every truth she can express to herself, and convinces herself this is what a family is. She knows he has already convinced himself of the same. She loves him for this.

She loves him for more than this. His jokes are charming, when they’re not repulsively chauvinistic in one of his frequent if futile grabs for male camaraderie. He seldom uses the strength his size affords him. And sometimes, when he his willing to listen and she to speak, their conversations will be some of the best Lilith has ever shared.

He’s Frederick’s father. This is the most important detail and the only one that is unconditional.

She knows, reasonably speaking, that the feeling she identifies as _love_ before Frederick is capable of any expression deserving of it is an evolutionary necessity. She knows that the traits she assigns to him in these days (cleverness, ebullience, kindness, curiosity) are little more than a reflection of her own hopes for him. But he will be some of these someday, and Lilith knows this, too.

So, she loves them both. She feels a love for them she has kept herself from feeling all her life, so deep that she understands why she has kept herself from feeling it.

(Dorothy kisses her when they are twenty-four and more accomplished than women twice their age. For just over seven seconds, Lilith forgets the second half of this. She cannot afford seven more.)

The love has such strength that even her recklessness returns. The day Frederick is born, she remembers at once the words she had buried: It is the happiest day of her life, and Lilith is certain that something is missing. One day, she will love them both enough to find it.

But recklessness is unsustainable, so she buries them once more. She seeks out missing things in music and writing and research, and she finds them. Frasier reads Freud these nights, fixated on that letter from Rolland, and Lilith entertains his talk of it. Still, the oceanic feeling of which he speaks eludes her, and she says so. With this, Frasier drags a hand from her elbow to her hand and cradles it there. She knows that he does this with the desire to unite them, but Lilith’s conviction only deepens: She is wholly separate from the world that surrounds her. The touch comforts her anyway.

In mid-March, Lilith spends three days on a retreat in Maine to finish her latest book. This is, at least, what she tells Frasier. In actuality, she has long since finished it; she spends three days instead visiting an old colleague in Maine to—in her words, not Lilith’s—reconnect. Ordinarily, Lilith would do anything to avoid such an invitation, but she remembers the woman better than most. Theresa. Polished, curt, well acquainted with Bekhterev. One of the few people with whom Lilith could bear to spend such time.

The first night is dinner, and Theresa describes her most recent publication in fifteen precise words. (At the seminar, years ago, where she and Frasier first met, he spent an hour describing his recent case study remarkable only for its utter insipidity.)

She invites Lilith to her apartment as they’re waiting for their check. Her unadorned hand on unadorned wrist rests on the table well past its midpoint, and Lilith supposes this means something. (On his fourth drink, he came far nearer to Lilith than she cared to experience and said, “If you’re interested in hearing more, there’s this truly charming little haunt of mine on Beacon—say next Friday?”)

Theresa opens the door to an apartment illuminated only by the full moon. “We’ve spent all evening discussing my work,” Theresa says, though they have not. She flips a switch positioned awkwardly behind the door she still holds. “Please, tell me: You’ve just done a study on women who pursue unhealthy relationships with men?”

Lilith steps inside. “I have. You intend to relate this to my marriage?”

“I do.” She reaches past Lilith, presses her palm to the door, and, with this, closes it. Then, “I’m mistaken?”

“Not entirely,” Lilith says. Theresa’s eyes move once down Lilith’s body, then return to her face. A small change, almost imperceptible, so Lilith gives no indication of having perceived it. “You see,” she continues, “Frasier represents the antithesis of these—you will forgive my use of my editor’s crude phrase?”

“I will. I may take your coat?”

“You may,” Lilith says, and Theresa does. “As I was saying, Frasier is the antithesis of these ‘bad boys’ whom these women come to seek in their act of self-sabotage.”

“And this takes but one form?” she asks. Ordinarily, Lilith would consider such questioning among Theresa’s best traits, but she knows already what she is suggesting.

Lilith does not entertain it. “Variations upon the one.”

“You’ve found this over four years of work?”

“Four years, three months. I’ve also had a child.”

“The book takes precedent?”

“It was harder to deliver.”

After a smile of a polite duration, Theresa asks, “Certainly of less personal significance?” The suggestion here is easier to deny, and Lilith is thankful for it.

“Certainly,” she says. “Frederick has already surpassed mimicry and is moving well into response-based communication. He should grow to be an exceedingly capable boy.”

“You’re well, then?”

“I am.”

“Happy?” The word is sharp even by Theresa’s standard. One could almost call it bitter—a suitable pairing, Frasier would say with that particular smugness of his, with the Zinfandel Theresa has already poured. Perhaps too much so.

Lilith nods and takes a single sip from the overfilled glass, for she has known nothing if not restraint, if not the art of letting one taste fill her up. Then, she has never wanted anything so badly as she wants her, and it is too easy to feign absence of intention with a glass of wine in hand. Of course, Theresa is above believing so facile an excuse, but she has a stronger grasp of courtesy than Lilith has ever cared to develop. (“I’m glad,” she says, though Lilith is certain she is not.) The whole thing could pass without so much as a word.

(She and Dorothy speak for three weeks about their misstep, Mondays and Wednesdays from one o’clock to three. It is excruciating, of course, to discuss feelings that Lilith does not intend to have, and more so to discuss those that Dorothy does. The second Wednesday is the most difficult; Dorothy says aloud the word that Lilith has been holding for thirteen years.)

But Lilith knows this: When she wants, she devours. She has been called cold more than her own name, but Lilith knows herself too well; someday her body will burn everything in sight. A single spark and the flames will spread for miles, eating up the world until she runs out of air. All this to say, Lilith cannot let herself want.

(Lilith straightens her arm and stretches out her hand, fingers together. Dorothy accepts the gesture but moves no closer, so that Lilith’s arm continues to reach toward her long after their hands are together.)

It is three hours to sunrise when Theresa drives Lilith to her hotel, and they have touched but once—a single handshake, fleeting and impersonal. There is a promise to meet again tomorrow. In her room, Lilith lets her hair from its bun, unbuttons her collar, and studies herself in the welter that is hers alone. Longing crashes inside of her, makes itself known in each curl of her hair, but Lilith has won. She wears the pearls herself tonight.

A betrayal on the Ides would have been a cliche, and Lilith is too well read to let herself become another tragedy.

On her return, Frasier fails to produce more than the tired facsimile of the long-suffering husband. A more impetuous Lilith would hate this about him, would hate that look of satisfaction he gets at the drone of a chuckle he receives in response. She would hate the transparency of its origins, hate knowing that all of this was in some quest for masculine validation his father never granted, hate more than anything that this makes them the same. But Lilith has outgrown her impetuosity; she is a mother now. She recalls instead the manner in which Norm speaks of Vera and wonders when she will attain the same luxury of absence when her husband chooses to deride her. A moment too late, she joins the laughter, then meets Frasier’s gaze, ice-cold, every bit of the woman they want her to be. He pantomimes suicidality, and a greater bout of laughter follows.

The moment they are alone, his breath encircles her neck, the humid suggestion of suffocating summer days to come: “God, I’ve missed you.”

Lilith counts to ten and empties her mind. She wraps her arms around his neck, closes her eyes. She says, “I’ve missed you, too.”

Lilith has long expected her body to betray her before her mind. Lately, she has been less certain.

(Of course, she has also written no fewer than half a dozen papers rejecting Cartesian dualism, but this is no matter.)

It takes more focus now. Lilith drums her fingers on her own arm this time. Four of them, rolling from the index out, a slower, steadier rhythm than their custom. Her own breathing, not his. She stops, recollects. Frasier’s hands move to her shoulders, pushing her just far enough away from himself to observe. He calls her some dreadful hypocorism, as if this could be an aphrodisiac even to the woman who did enjoy sleeping with him, and asks what could possibly be the matter.

He has not asked her this before tonight, and she has not thought to prepare the answer. For once, Lilith is without a plan. She tells the truth, or half of it: “We’re out of practice.”

“Finally,” he says. “A problem I can fix.”

Briefly, the image of Theresa’s hand flickers into being. Then, the touch of Diane’s upon her face. Then, a stranger’s to her back, small but certain. The guilt will last longer than any of these.

(For Lilith knows, as a scientist, that the mind is nothing without relation to the body. Were she to subscribe, as she had in her youth, to a more radical view, she could end that sentence five words sooner. She does not, but, still, as a wife, she knows that relation and oneness are wholly distinct.)

For once, for now, her breathing matches his.

She relearns the precision with which she was once able to discard the mind altogether—to study it, then say that it does not exist at all. She has softened, since then, since extolling Skinner above all others, but there remains a comfort in the acknowledgment of only what takes form in action.

They are content together, like this, when Lilith’s mother visits with a complaint. This activity is nothing unusual, of course, for Lilith’s mother often has complaints, but Frasier has resolved to make the visit different. As simply as this, both are entirely yielding to each suggestion that follows.

They’re meant to wed again—before her mother, of course, but before their colleagues, before the people from Cheers, too—and they do, for Lilith does all that she is meant to do, and Frasier has sworn to her to do the same. This is why she is willing to swear herself once more to him.

But she must first look like a woman must. The whole evening, Lilith has known from the first suggestion, is the question she never gave her mother the chance to pose and the only one she would fail to speak even had the chance arisen. It relies upon the knowledge she will never share. So, she answers it with certainty. She is happy to be somebody else for the sake of her family.

Lilith, of course, is no stranger to makeup. She knows, from the comments of seldom-well-meaning acquaintances, that this would surprise some. Even before Diane intervened, Lilith has known how to make herself beautiful, how to present an image of professionalism that is never expected of a man. Lilith allows her mother to do it all, until she no longer looks like herself.

And when Frasier sees her, he lets his compliment take the form of a question.

She smiles at him. He had always intended to resolve their relationship this way, Lilith knows. Waiting for her to find the strength for herself, prodding when his inaction was too little to spur her into speaking. A joke, even, that comment about her appearance. A play on the absurdity of the archaic gender roles that have driven her discomfort since childhood. She knows, now, that he knows her, and she has never loved him more.

For a moment, she intends to reenact their marriage as happily as if she had wished for it herself. Removing the makeup, freeing herself from the dress, pulling her hair into the bun she prefers—all such simple things—and her marriage would be hers, her mother’s question answered. There is not enough time for any of this. The music begins, slipping through the crack of the shut door.

At once, she and Frasier decide that the ceremony can wait. She reapplies her lipstick before it begins.

(As students, she and Dorothy would scoff over the very idea of dualism together. A category mistake, they’d say, as if they were the only two people on Earth to have read Ryle. There was always something about Dorothy that made Lilith feel they were the only two people on Earth at all. When they are together, a part of her feels it still.)

The next time she visits, Dorothy brings a woman with her, a postdoc whose shoulders slump with what almost seems to be intention. She is five years younger and—this is minimized by her deplorable posture—six inches taller than Dorothy, and, when Lilith tries to shake her hand, she gives half a nod without any further acknowledgment. With this, Lilith knows that Dorothy has told her everything. She is certain that not all of it is kind.

Frasier joins them only once, for dinner, before dismissing his failure to appropriately engage as a lack of familiarity with—the women at the table exchange a glance at this, surely confirming his misguided impression— _girl talk._

“What was it?” asks Dorothy’s companion. Her name is Margaret, Lilith knows, but she is not yet so familiar to warrant the natural use of it. She grins, and Dorothy is transfixed awaiting her next words. Lilith has seen the look before. She was once accustomed to being its focus. “I’m having trouble remembering. It was you who began our conversation on aromatherapy, wasn’t it? And the local antique shops we might wish to explore?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it was, but you must understand—“

Margaret does not allow him to continue, and Dorothy grows still more enraptured. “The only subject that comes to mind is, I believe, our dispute over Romantic composers—Schumann, et cetera.”

Frasier here seems prepared to interject. Margaret, in a bold if unnecessary feminist act, elected to direct her praise to “Schumann and her husband” with an unfaltering nonchalance that forbade any further question. In the moment, it resulted in the same expression Frasier typically reserves for wine procured from the supermarket—in Lilith’s opinion, his fourth least flattering. With the wound reopened, Lilith is certain that he will at last verbalize his frustration, but Margaret leaves him no time.

“Then, there’s my overwhelming aura of femininity. All of ours, really.” She nods once more to Lilith, again unnoticed by Frasier. "We could do nothing more than recite the periodic table, but the simple _girlish_ quality to us all would bestow upon our conversation the title of _girl talk_ regardless of circumstance.” She leans across the table, still smiling, and, for the first time, pauses. “Was that it?”

From this Frasier knows that he can make no recovery, so, mercifully, he suppresses the reappearance of that tired expression and says simply, “My apologies.”

Frasier interrupts their arrangement of breakfast with an excuse for his absence the moment he invents it (“A dreadfully demanding case, this one!”). Only he feigns disappointment at the news.

“You’re unhappy with Frasier,” Dorothy tells her that morning.

“That’s very astute.”

Margaret looks up from her coffee, to which she’s added more sugar than any person could possibly enjoy. “It’s the money, isn’t it?”

“My prolificacy offsets the wage disparity typical between sexes, and I hardly indulge in—”

“Anything?” Margaret suggests. She grins again, this one unlike that she had produced at dinner. Lilith suspects that it is a premature gesture of affection meant to foster a sort of camaraderie between them, but Dorothy nudges her, and she takes up a new expression. Affecting some approximation of a transatlantic accent, she says, “My apologies.”

“That was funny,” Lilith says. “You know, I’m something of a comedian myself.”

They spend the morning like this, and, in these hours, Lilith waits for a feeling that does not come. She will think of the irony, later, when the feeling returns, but, for the moment, she must admit that she is without the impression that anything is missing at all.

She has been thinking of this, in the weeks leading up to the summer. The night before it begins, Lilith kisses Frederick goodnight, and she leaves the way her father did, without warning.

Unlike her father, she keeps close. Lilith remains unmoved by impulse; she has accounted for every possible emergency. For each of these, she is present. Even her planning cannot predict the ease with which she finds a home: Before Lilith can begin to justify her situation, Sheila has already offered up space in her apartment. The place is too large for one person anyhow, she says, and she’s laughing while she says it, reaching a hand to Lilith’s arm. She, of course, can mean nothing by it. They are colleagues, and to pursue any sort of relationship beyond the platonic would jeopardize the department’s function. It is nothing more than a much-needed source of light in the two-windowed apartment, no different from the piercing lemon yellow of her skirt.

Still, in her leaving, Lilith has unleashed something. However unrealized, desire surrounds her. She loves the feeling as immediately as her own son, and more primordially. At the realization, guilt grazes her shoulders, then passes; a poor mother is made in the suppression of the self.

She catches sight of herself in the bedroom mirror three nights later. (She has looked in the mirror already; she has no fear of her own reflection, but all of these looks have been with intention. This one is not.) Without knowing what observation is to come, Lilith’s shoulders are more relaxed, her face her own.

Lilith has stopped wearing makeup since deciding to leave, and it feels the way a more sentimental woman, or perhaps a woman with a less complicated relationship with her family, might describe coming home. She was taught, years ago, that the halting of such grooming is a behavior often indicative of depression.

(Lilith is not depressed. She has simply made, as she always has, a choice.)

Her colleagues cease asking her whether she is suffering from a particularly longevous strain of influenza the same week Frasier makes no fewer than fifteen presumably empty threats ranging from recycling back issues of _Forced Exposure_ to suicide. Lilith does not entertain them, and he allows her to visit Frederick with little more in way of theatrics. Already, he seems to have grown.

Lilith has found much in her life easy, and it is easy, now, seeing him, to want to return. Of course, she knows that Frasier is a satisfactory father. A good one, even, and surely a better parent than she, even before she left. But she sees that Frederick has grown, and she knows that she is his mother, and both of these will continue, but she has chosen to miss both.

Frasier watches her with their child in a way he never did, when Lilith was the stable member of their partnership. Rather, when she participated in such a partnership at all. It isn’t something she wants to do again, in the same capacity.

Lilith leaves, again, and tells no one of the decision.

She attends a conference that month. She knows who she is here, and returns to her at once. A skirt suit, dark lipstick, a polite smile shown even (indeed, especially) to those of little competence. She watches presenters most closely in the moments after she poses a question. All but one hesitate. The exception—Nancy, her research on phantom limb pain—finds her later and offers a drink ticket.

“For a wonderful question,” Nancy says.

“I already have one.”

“I have two. I have an undergraduate assistant. Would you like his?”

“No, thank you. One drink is sufficient. If you wish to speak with me, however, you would be welcome to do so.”

Sitting beside her, Nancy gives another of her too-warm smiles. “I do,” she says. “I’ve been thinking that someone so good at asking questions must do some interesting work herself.”

They speak for too long. Nancy invites Lilith to her hotel room, and Lilith suspects that it is an invitation for something other than conversation. She doesn’t ask, but she accepts.

Nancy leans against the closed door of her room. The unpleasant warmth of her smile has dissolved. It’s charming, now. Encouraging, perhaps. Lilith counts her own breaths.

 _One._ Five moles form a miniature Cassiopeia on Nancy’s neck. Lilith could extend a hand and touch them all, and not a single one would burn. The angles are wrong for Cassiopeia, if one is familiar enough with the shape, but the image remains. A woman chained to her throne, arms spread out to the world. She’s told this story to her son once already, lying under the stars that do. Like most, it is one of hubris. What is it that gives her reason to boast? What writhes naked at the water’s edge for her sin?

 _Two._ In the myth, they are the same, the treasure and the captive. Lilith cannot become another tragedy; under more thorough examination, she suspects the monster would be Cetus no more. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Cetus—all one.

 _Three._ She could come home tonight with the intention of staying, come home and tell Frasier of the thought between his words of hate and love. He would divide them into clean parts, not caring that action could envelop it all. Ego, superego, id—all one.

 _Four._ There is a truth in the way something inside seems to ache with the delight of everything primal, and Lilith has sought nothing if not what is true.

 _Five._ Lilith has spent seventeen years closing her eyes to keep from seeking anything at all.

 _Six._ Her breaths haven grown closer together, an undeniable manifestation of everything she has refused. She must recollect herself.

 _Seven._ The problem is this: If Andromeda is the perfect and beautiful thing inside her, there must too be a Perseus. Lilith is the kind of woman to save herself, but she cannot slay Medusa; it is already too much in her nature to turn to stone.

Lilith discards the analogy. She wants. She seeks.

Consequences are for women with something to lose. Lilith has surrendered all of herself already. The last time she sees the red stain that spent years on her mouth, it sits on Nancy’s skin like a bruise. Her hips are the first place it has ever belonged.

The flames spread.


End file.
